I’d quote the whole article, but go read what Anand Giridharadas writes regarding the opposite of fascism.
The best revenge against these grifters and bigots and billionaires and bullies is to live well, richly, together.
The best revenge is to refuse their values. To embody the kind of living — free, colorful, open — they want to snuff out.
The New York Times goes in depth as to how Elon Musk took over the government.
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
And with a little education on a few bureaucratic agencies, that’s essentially what happened.
Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump’s early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it. A failure to resist, however, could pave the way for authoritarian entrenchment—with grave and enduring consequences for global democracy.
In Foreign Affairs, The Path to American Authoritarianism